I'd really like some improvement to ship-to-ship combat as well. I know we aren't going to get tactical battles, but it would be nice if the ships actually faced towards the enemy ship when they fired. It isn't THAT hard to do. I know this because I've done it myself, and I suck at programming AI.

Orbits could be handled by displaying a star and its planets as one object on the map, with the planets themselves showing as orbiting their star much like the moons orbit their planets presently. You would have to "enter" a system (much like how you enter orbit around a planet presently), which would open a "star system sub map", to go to a particular planet. This would make a whole lot more sense than the current system, which shows planets as orbiting 2 and 3 parsecs from their stars, or 600-900 trillion km (370-560 miles), roughly. That is 2-3 million times as far as the average distance between Earth and Sol (the sun, for those who do not know), which would make every planet in GalCiv2 uninhabitable by anything whose blood was not made of liquid nitrogen.

3D is not hard to handle, Relic has done it with the Homeworld line of games, and in RTS format too, so a nice, slow-paced TBS implementation should be easier. It's also been done in many other games before, heck, Ascendancy was a 3D 4x TBS game and it came out ten years ago! "Hard" is a state of mind, find an innovative approach to something and it is no longer hard. It's only when you decide in your mind, "this is too hard", that it becomes too hard. I believe Stardock was and is capable of doing a 3D GalCiv game, but they have to decide whether they want to do a 3D GalCiv game. If that ever happens, though, it will have to be "GalCiv3", as it's too late to make such a fundamental paradigm shift now.

Galciv 2 has a nice 3d engine so i dont know what are u talking about ... just uncheck the camera angle in game options and u can watch it wfrom whatever angle u like but i ahve to amit that this game feels empty without any realtime based skills ( except for the invasion thing ^^) i would really love to micro my fleets in a realtime battle.

Mistoffeles said- "Orbits could be handled by displaying a star and its planets as one object on the map, with the planets themselves showing as orbiting their star much like the moons orbit their planets presently. You would have to "enter" a system (much like how you enter orbit around a planet presently), which would open a "star system sub map", to go to a particular planet. "

That sounds very much like GalCiv I, and trust me, you do not want that back. It didn't make a lot of sense and required too much clicking and it didn't look good graphically either.